If the public fascination with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass digital surveillance and the continued popularity of cultural products such as The Night Manager tell us anything, it is that spies and spying still exert a powerful pull on our collective imagination. That banal observation aside, the rise of the modern national security state through the Cold War and after has brought to prominence a constellation of clandestine government agencies. Few agencies are more criticized, eulogized, and mythologized than the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Such mythologies stem from both agency and non-agency efforts: public-relations campaigns, Hollywood movies, lurid thrillers, and sober academic tracts.
In his latest book, Christopher R. Moran of the University of Warwick's Politics and International Studies Department addresses another way in which the image of the CIA has been presented, manipulated, and contested: the memoir. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Moran opens with a discussion of Herbert Yardley's memoir of his time as a cryptanalyst for the US government before the US intelligence community suffered a precipitous decline in the interwar period. The debates over publication of Yardley's American Black Chamber set the pattern for official responses to reminiscences about the secret world, responses that would echo into the Cold War and beyond.
Company Confessions is less a new history of the CIA – that is self-evidently not the author's intention – but rather a history of the CIA's efforts to mould and manipulate its public image to meet the requirements of official constituencies and external critics. In this regard it is very successful, portraying an agency and its leaders at once enamoured with the glamour of secrecy and power and at the same time burdened by the need for discretion. For those unfamiliar with the history of secret intelligence in the Cold War, there may be occasional pause to consult more general histories of the agency in order to clarify certain key points.
The book is most successful at demonstrating very clearly – and with a wealth of evidence – that the CIA was an active, vital participant in the creation of its public image. Moran effectively shows that from a period of uncertainty about how to deal with friendly and hostile memoirs, the creation of the Publications Review Board (PRB) brought with it both bureaucratic rigour and even more problems for the agency.
What is also fascinatingly detailed is the role of agency leaders in creating the image of Central Intelligence and reacting to memoirists. The legendary Allen Dulles vested in himself almost sole responsibility for the presentation of the CIA to the world. In contrast, Admiral Stansfield Turner – Jimmy Carter's appointee as director of Central Intelligence in 1977 – instituted an expansive programme of openness and public relations. This was in the main driven by the post-Watergate atmosphere, where in the mid-1970s the CIA had been exposed by journalists and Congress as an agency up to all sorts of dirty tricks at home and abroad.
None of this is to say that the book is perfect. What book ever is? What would have been beneficial is some brief reflection on the nature of the memoir and its role as a “vector of memory.” While, admittedly, this would draw the work slightly more towards the academically theoretical, it might have provided another useful underpinning to an impressive piece. However, this is a quibble in the face of extremely engagingly written, systematically researched, and forcefully argued work.
Company Confessions is an eminently praiseworthy piece of research and analysis. It treads that fine line between academic rigour (which it has to an impressive degree) and a witty, engaging, popular style. It draws upon a vast range of material, in terms of agency memoirs, archival sources, and interviews. This is not just a book for cloistered academic scholars of intelligence, the US government, or the history of covert operations. Company Confessions is a volume that deserves to find a wide public readership. It is at times black tragicomedy, secret history, and cautionary tale for our information-overloaded times.
